Cheryl Goldsleger: Points of Order, Points of View

Goldsleger complements, balances, adjusts: the representational into the abstract; the asceticism of line (mind) into the voluptuousness of wax (flesh); the minimal into the replete; drawing into painting; dark into light; negative into positive; the plain into the beautiful; restraint into release; the pragmatic into the magical; the classic into the anti-classic in order to reach a state of equilibrium, of completion: as in Newtonian physics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. It is these balancings and oppositions that add scope to her patterns, to her visual gambits. The physicality of her work takes them out of the conceptual and into the sheer substantiality of pigment, oil, wax, and linen, all traditional materials, where form itself is meaningful. In the context of abstraction today, Cheryl Goldsleger cleaves to modernist aesthetics infused with more private introspections and interpolations. Hers is an ordered, elegant mania, a formalism that is rubbed, glowing, resonant and ambivalent, possessing a careful beauty that is more European in its sense of finish and fabrication than American, removed from the gestural imperative and immediacy of much signature American painting yet too fraught to be minimalist. Cheryl Goldsleger’s aesthetic proposes that order, measure, proportion – with a difference – once again be the standard and definition of art, of beauty.